2 July, 1918
We have words, we are taught by speech, and the teachers use language of wonderful flexibility and beauty, like the language of the greatest poets. But through and behind what they say there shines a meaning far beyond that of words, and with that meaning we see a radiation of colour, sometimes one colour, sometimes another, and sometimes many colours together, and those marvelous shades of luminous colour become associated in our understanding with different shades of meaning. When you read poetry you feel the different shades between the lines, but you could not express to your selves, or anyone else, exactly how they differ from one another. We learn simply by learning to feel that one shade of meaning is represented by one shade of colour, another shade of meaning by another shade of colour.
This, you see, is an elementary sifting out of our different perceptions of meaning. To see different meanings as different colours is to be able to hold them apart, instead of having them all more or less merged in a general sensation of beauty. Later, we go beyond this simple colour symbolisation, not that we lose it, any more than we lose the beauty of poetical language.
We lose nothing, but we go further to add new powers of understanding through differentiation. The colour differentiation is an elementary step.
You have fully realized that colour is character, the particular shade which the eternal goodness takes when it shines through this or that personality. So you begin to realize now, those of you who can see, that certain personalities radiate certain colours.
There is a further descent, so to speak, of the power to identify colour with character now being developed for humanity. A descent in the sense that the power to perceive the psychic colourings is no longer to be confined to clairvoyance; an effort is being made to get the esoteric perception through to those who would not call themselves psychic at all. It is being brought, it is being subtly infused into your philosophy, your education. It is coming to have a new significance in your pictorial art. It will very soon make its definite appearance even in your objective science.
A good deal of this you may not yet be able to understand. The last statement does not contain anything that you can trace in the present, it refers to the future. But the earth is reaching a stage at which underlying meanings can begin to be differentiated, and so more clearly held and understood and unified, because unity can only come about through finer and subtler differentiation. And the lesson that we first have taught to us in our halls of learning is just beginning now to be a possibility for those who are still on the earth, not only for their physical understanding, but for their mental understanding too. Watch the progress of thought, present human thought in its various aspects nowadays, and you will catch a hint in one region after another that a deep consciousness is creeping in of the significance of colour as representing the finer shades that no language, even the most perfect, can express.
Remember that I have told you about this colour symbolism, how it is only the most elementary beginning of a new power to perceive and understand.
